Horatio Nelson, then in his fortieth year, had been in the navy ever since he was twelve. He had served in the West Indies, in the Far East, in the Polar Seas, in the Mediterranean; he had commanded ships since he was twenty;he had lost his right eye in battle; he had just recuperated from the loss of his right arm, incurred a year earlier in his stubborn and unsuccessful attack on the Canary Islands. After a long convalescence in England, he was impatient to return to active service. His ambition, his thirst for glory were perhaps even more impetuous than Bonaparte's, though in an entirely different manner, and his almost pathological hatred of the French nation in general and the French Revolution in particular made him regard himself as a God chosen instrument for their punishment. "He had such a horror of all Frenchmen", declares one of his officers, "that I believe he thought them at all times nearly as corrupt in body as in mind.  He also affected, it may be added without prejudice to his glory, to entertain a peculiarly intimate relationship with the Almighty, whom he gratefully credited, along with his subordinates, for his successes. In this respect his modesty exceeded Bonaparte's, who claimed all the credit for himself. (2)

One still finds it hard to understand how the secret of the expedition's destination was so well kept; many people knew the plan in Paris, couriers were traveling all over France and Italy, regiments were on the move and the ships assembling in the ports were there for all to see. The British knew well enough that an expedition was being prepared, but the fact remains that long after the French fleet had sailed they still believed that either a descent was to be made on Naples or that Bonaparte, turning west through the Straits of Gibraltar, would head for England or Ireland. 

Whatever Bonaparte's thoughts may have been that morning at Toulon, it is indisputable that the vast majority of the 34,000 men aboard his ships did not share them. The sea was choppy, and especially in the smaller craft-almost to a man they were seasick. They did not know where they were going or how long they would be at sea. 

The prevailing ignorance of geography and of current politics led to some astounding guesses; the majority, however, expected to land in Naples or Sicily; only a few, by putting two and two together, surmised that their destination was the Levant. For the time being, and during most of the journey to Malta and thence to Alexandria, their main concern was their seasickness. Cramped for space, ill supplied, retching, unable to change their clothes, they soon regretted that they had ever left land, and nothing of what awaited them was to make them stop regretting it. The Egyptian campaign may have been the most ideal time of Napoléon's life, but decidedly was not the most ideal time of theirs. The grumbling began almost as soon as the fleet left Toulon.

On May 10, immediately after his arrival at Toulon, the Commander-in-Chief had reviewed and addressed his troops.
 
 

The speech continued in this style for a minute of two. It was followed by shouts of "Long lives the immortal Republic" and by patriotic hymns. 

There was a hitch at the last moment over the treaty negotiations with Austria, and for a week or two it looked as though the war might be renewed in Europe itself, but by May 4, 1798, the crisis was over and Bonaparte slipped quietly out of Paris. He traveled with Joséphine in the first of two carriages, and the luggage and the aides-de-camp followed on behind. They took the route through Auxerre, Chalon, Lyons, Valence and Avignon, and reached Toulon in the excellent time of five days. The port was alive with the stir and movement of the embarkation, and soldiers were everywhere, the infantry in their black, knee-length gaiters, tight white breeches, coats faced with scarlet and the revolutionary cockade in their hats, the officers in their shakos and epaulettes: Bonaparte took rooms with Joséphine in the Hotel de l'Intendant and issued the customary exhortation to the troops. They were, he declared, "a wing of the Army of England", and at the successful conclusion of the expedition each man was to be given six acres of land. 

The prevailing ignorance of geography and of current politics led to some astounding guesses; the majority, however, expected to land in Naples or Sicily; only a few, by putting two and two together, surmised that their destination was the Levant. For the time being, and during most of the journey to Malta and thence to Alexandria, their main concern was their seasickness. Cramped for space, ill supplied, retching, unable to change their clothes, they soon regretted that they had ever left land, and nothing of what awaited them was to make them stop regretting it. The Egyptian campaign may have been the most ideal time of Napoleon's life, but decidedly was not the most ideal time of theirs. The grumbling began almost as soon as the fleet left Toulon. 

By May 12 the embarkation was complete, but a storm had blown up and Brueys waited until May 18 for it to abate. Then at last he gave the word to sail. Bonaparte seems to have hoped almost to the end that Joséphine would come with him, but she had good reasons (quite apart from her lovers) for remaining behind; she was not well, and if she was to have a child by Bonaparte she must follow the doctors' advice and take the waters at Plombières, she must look after her house and family in Paris, she would join him in a month or two .... In the end Bonaparte gave in and they parted on the quay. On May 19 he went on board l'Orient, a ship of the line with 120 guns, with Berthier and his personal staff, and followed the rest of the fleet out to sea. 

Having left Spithead aboard H.M.S. Vanguard on April 10, Nelson arrived off Cadiz at the end of the month, whence St. Vincent despatched him to the Mediterranean. His small squadron was in the Gulf of Lions when, on May 17, it captured a French corvette; interrogating the crew, Nelson learned that thirteen French battleships were ready to sail from Toulon. The heavy weather of May 19-20, which caused considerable discomfort to the troops on the French convoys, inconvenienced Admiral Nelson even more. Far from being able to keep the French fleet under surveillance, Nelson barely escaped being wrecked aboard the Vanguard, which was dismasted in the storm. This was the beginning of a series of contretemps that were to plague the Admiral for the following ten weeks. Still, as Nelson wrote to his wife, thanks to the exertions of Almighty God and of Captains Saumarez and Ball, his battleships reached safety off the Sardinian island of San Pietro, and the damage was repaired in four days. By May 27, he resumed his position before Toulon, eight days after his quarry had slipped away. It was only on June 7 that he was joined by reinforcements- eleven ships of the line sent to him by Lord St. Vincent. Without these, there was little Nelson could have done to stop Brueys's squadron of thirteen battleships. Unfortunately for him, he had lost his frigates and sloop during the storm. In the belief that Nelson would have to repair his flagship at Gibraltar, their commander, Captain Hope, had taken them there instead of rejoining Nelson before Toulon. The ensuing comedy of errors was largely due to the absence of the frigates, without which the English fleet found it difficult to reconnoitre the course taken by the French.

With thirteen battleships of seventy-four guns and one of fifty, the British squadron was about evenly matched in firing power with the French and superior in every other way. Admiral Nelson's instructions were unambiguous: he was to find the French squadron, prevent it at all costs from any movement westward, pursue it, and destroy it. The difficulty proved in finding it.

When Lord Spencer wrote to Lord St. Vincent that the fate of Europe depended on the English squadron in the Mediterranean, he probably was right, but not quite in the sense he intended. If, during the first lap of its crossing, the French armada had not been delayed by the slowness of the transports and by the difficulty of effecting a junction with the three other convoys, if it had reached and left Malta two days earlier than it did, Admiral Nelson would have annihilated it, battleships, transports, troops, and all, off Alexandria, about June 28. If it had been even slower and taken a day or two longer to reach Malta, the same would have happened, in all probability, off Malta about June 20. If, on June 22, when the two fleets were within a few miles of one another, this conjunction had occurred during the day instead of at night, Nelson, instead of unwittingly overtaking the French fleet, would have destroyed it. If Nelson had been a more indolent man and proceeded less impetuously in his pursuit, the same would have happened. And if the Knights of Malta had followed their glorious tradition instead of yielding to the French like a half-willing maiden, they could have defended their virtually impregnable stronghold long enough to see their besiegers routed by the English fleet. That none of this happened, that Bonaparte was able to conquer Malta almost without a blow and to land his forces near Alexandria without interference, was due not to planning or calculation but to the unpredictable interplay of miscalculations on both sides and to the fortuitous effects of human behaviour. In other words, Bonaparte was lucky. He was the first to admit it. Or, as Nelson put it in his theological approach to the fortunes of war, "the Devil's children  have the Devil's luck." To be sure, when luck was on his side, he called it Divine Providence."

If Almighty Providence had prevailed over the Devil's luck, and Nelson had caught the French before or during their landing in Egypt, undoubtedly Egyptian history would have been quite different for the next two centuries. There would be no Muhammad `Aliy Dynasty, no digging of the Suez Canal - which would have prevented the Western rivalry over Egypt, no 1881`Urabiy's revolution to fend it off, no British Occupation, and consequently neither the 1919 nor the 1952 revolutions would have occured, nor we would have heard of Israel and the rape of the holy land.

Perhaps the future of Egypt would not have been robbed blindly and precious Egyptian lives would not have been sacrificed needlessly before their time. Alas, their fate was indeed determined by the unwitting game of blind man's buff that Admiral Nelson and General Bonaparte were playing with each other across the vast expanse of the indifferent Mediterranean Sea.